Bedroom Blues

When I asked Doug on Friday night how he would feel about me painting the bedroom on Saturday, I got "the look."

Doug is a DIY-er with the best of them, but he is never on board with change for its own sake.

I am....

When we bought our little house in Newark almost 8 years ago, the previous owner had just had all of the rooms painted.

For the most part, I liked her choices... except for the master bedroom (and I use that term loosely--in the 1930s they didn't build master bedrooms in houses like ours.  Yes, one of our two bedrooms is slightly larger than the other one, but it's still only about 10 x 11).

Anyway, that room was painted a kind of purply chocolate brown, which just made it seem cave-like.  We lived with it for two years, and then I couldn't stand it anymore.  I chose a blue kind of like faded denim jeans and repainted the room.

But after five years, I realized that the blue was just too blue to be neutral, and it really limited my ability to change the look of the room by changing the bedding (and I don't have a prayer of changing the look by moving the furniture--you don't rearrange the furniture in a 10x11 bedroom because there's only one way it fits...and barely at that).

So on Saturday morning, I went to Sherwin Williams in search of a nice grey.

Hmmm.  Do you know how many greys there are? Some are bluish, some greenish, some khaki-ish.  I finally chose one that looked grey next to the pale blues but is actually bluish after all--kind of like sea glass.

Here's the room on Saturday morning after I took down the pictures and before I painted. We had to just work around the furniture:

And here's that same corner with the new color on the walls and everything back in place:

With Sherwin Williams paint running $45 a gallon WITH my coupon, I was determined to get by with one gallon.  So we opted not to paint the heat registers (one is behind the bed anyway, and the one in this picture is my version of an accent wall):

There's a story behind the curtains too.

The painting took only a few hours because we were doing only the walls, not the ceiling or trim.

So at about 2:00, with the bed remade, the pictures rehung, and the mess cleaned up, kittens called to us.

Our favorite antique store, Brandywine View in Chadds Ford, Pa., had been posting pix on Facebook of a stray cat they had taken in.  Last week, they discovered that she had kittens in a box on their porch.

I can't resist kittens, so off we went. (No, I wasn't going to bring one home, but it was a good excuse to go there on a rainy Saturday afternoon.)

How cute are these two little dudes?

While we were there, I sorted through a pile of grain sacks and decided I could make curtains out of them for the bedroom.  It's hard to get good pix in this room because of the light and the size of the room, but I'm happy with how they turned out. We open our windows from the top down for air, so I use just short cafe curtains on the bottom half of both windows for privacy:

Now that it's all done, Doug admits that he likes the new color.

He just hates change.